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Delivering Welfare

Summary of Key Points
Provision of welfare services is made on both universal and selective bases.Social policy analysis in the past often concentrated upon the providers rather than the users of welfare services.Access to welfare services is ‘rationed’ by a range of formal and informal mechanisms.The bureaucratic and paternalistic nature of some public services has sometimes operated to exclude users from having much control over these services through lack of exit or voice.New Public Management practices imported business management ethos and methods into public service delivery in the late twentieth century.Performance management has sometimes led to a focus upon inputs and outputs within public services, rather than the outcomes of these.Independent audit and inspection of service providers has developed as a means of ensuring public accountability of services as an alternative to individual complaints or appeals.Modernization of public services under Labour led to new commitments to partnership working between agencies both within the state and across different welfare providers.The replacement of government with governance involved a shift from electoral to ‘deliberative’ democracy.Personalization and co-production are being promoted to give users more control over the services they receive.Public service reform now embraces a shift to encouragement of and support for commercial and third sector providers of welfare services.Commissioning of services from non-state providers has been shifting towards an outcome focus and more emphasis on ‘payment by results’.